An Unlikely Countess: Lily Budge and the 13th Earl of Galloway

We cannot know how much of this early behaviour had its foundations in a genuine and innate mental condition and how much of it was the result of profound unhappiness and childhood confusion exacerbated by a wildly inappropriate environment. If one were to hazard a guess, it would be a combination of the two. However bizarre Randolph’s behaviour was at Belhaven, he seems to have been capable of self-examination. In his unpublished memoirs which are drawn on here, it is around this period that he first starts to refer to himself in terms of being considered ‘mad’ and ‘a lunatic’. He uses the words freely, at times almost with a degree of relish. Shortly after his eleventh birthday, for instance, at the end of October 1939, he contracted the measles and his behaviour became what he calls ‘distorted and ‘slightly mad’. ‘I was gripped to hypnotism with fright and terror,’ he later wrote.

That Britain was once again at war with Germany raised Lord Galloway up to his full military potential. He had maintained a keen interest in the Territorial Army in the inter-war years, and now he raised and commanded the 7th (Galloway) battalion of the King’s Own Scottish Borderers. (A year later he was to retire from the battalion on medical grounds. He was appointed Honorary Colonel but, undaunted, he would raise the local unit of the Home Guard.) Whenever Lord Galloway and Randolph were resident at Cumloden at the same time, Lord Galloway desperately searched for proof of some kind of development in his son. He was usually disappointed. During tea in the dining room he liked to fire general knowledge questions at Randolph, which Randolph could never answer. ‘Don’t pretend to be so silly, foolish boy!’ the dowager countess would snap.

It was not long before the effects of war began to be felt at Cumloden. The house began to receive evacuees, who were housed in its outbuildings, and during the Blitz in the autumn of 1940 extended family from the south began to arrive. Sometime between 14 September and 14 October, 34 Bryanston Square, where Randolph had been born, received a direct hit. Lord and Lady Galloway decided that Lady Antonia was no longer safe in her boarding school in the south of England, so they pulled her out and brought her back to Cumloden. Randolph clung to the hope they would do the same for him. They did not. In light of the increased bombings, it was decided that Belhaven should be evacuated to Dinnet House, an ancient Scottish mansion with poor electricity near Aboyne on Deeside, in north-east Scotland. As a consequence Lord and Lady Galloway considered the location quite safe enough. Randolph was to go back to school.

It was, Randolph wrote later, ‘rather awful’. The boys now worked mainly by candlelight, due to the antiquated and constantly malfunctioning electricity mains, and when it began to snow the school was cut off from all civilisation. Randolph felt more trapped and abandoned than ever. He wanted the comfort of his family. Matron would not do. From a window he would watch the snow fall, his cheeks hot and wet with tears, knowing that with every new inch piling up on the railway tracks, it was becoming increasingly unlikely that he would be able to go home for the holidays. ‘Nevertheless,’ he wrote, ‘my attitude did not stop the snow from falling, the more I cried the heavier the snowfall turned, leaving me a tear stained wreck before the night was out.’ Cumloden, home to his much missed mother and sister, the familiar and comforting faces of the staff and increasing numbers of relatives from the south, felt a long way off. Randolph began to dream of escape. In these dreams, he would be running down the school drive carrying his luggage, Miss Simms in pursuit, wearing the deerstalker hat that had suddenly replaced the coffee-coloured boater since they had arrived in the Highlands.

In December 1941 Lord Galloway decided to move Randolph to Chartridge Hill House, a boarding school near Chesham in Buckinghamshire, a decision that might very well have been shaped by the school’s proximity to the London doctors Randolph was about to see, and his father’s desire to get him into Harrow (Belhaven records state that Randolph ‘went to a private school for special coaching’). In a final flourish of despair, Mr Simms wrote in Randolph’s leaving report that he had driven him to the end of his tether. Another teacher added that Randolph would have to make more of an effort and keep his wits about him, and still another concluded that Randolph was extremely backward for his years and would have to learn to grow up. Randolph might well have been young for his years – he was thirteen – but that Christmas, the schoolmasters’ counsel did not prevent Lord Galloway from pressing ahead with his own programme of development. He presented Randolph with a gun, and soon after Randolph began to go shooting with Mr Malcolm Scott, the gamekeeper. By the end of the holiday, he was accompanying Lord Galloway on organised shoots at Larg. Much to everybody’s surprise, he showed signs of becoming a rather good shot.

Randolph’s enrolment at Chartridge Hill House marked an important change in his family’s approach to him. ‘Through psychological and psychiatric causes that term I had injections inflicted on me by Dr Johnson, the school’s Buckinghamshire doctor man,’ Randolph recorded.

Given Randolph’s perceived instability, it is most likely that Lord and Lady Galloway had decided that it was appropriate for him to be sedated, in order to curb his wild bouts of behaviour. Paraldehyde was the most used sedative in the first half of the twentieth century and could be easily administered by injection. It calmed patients down without impairing their intellectual capacity. But despite being under sedation, Randolph was to receive no soft handling. Lord Galloway instructed Mr Stafford Webber, Randolph’s new headmaster, to forbid him from spending too much time with his southern relatives. Lord Galloway explained that Randolph had become ‘spoiled, pampered and petted’ and that he was still in need of toughening up.

It had already been settled that Randolph would attend Harrow School, just as three generations of his family had done. His passage to the school that had produced Sir Winston Churchill, Lord Byron, and Lord Palmerston was predestined. The full weight of family history had been pointing him in that direction since birth. Virescit vulnere virtus was the family motto and he would simply have to rise to it. That he could not frustrated Randolph deeply, and it made him even more terrified of his father. As is so often the case when the weak are terrified of the strong, the very fear itself feeds the problem, causing paralysis in the former and even greater fury in the latter.

In June 1942 the dowager countess died. She was buried in the graveyard of All Saints’, Challoch, with the other Stewarts. A month later Randolph returned home from school and further irked his father. ‘I gorged and guzzled at my food to grossest excesses, and ate far too much for the parents’ conveniance [sic] and expense,’ he wrote, ‘The father man was truly disgusted at me, I was rude, discourteous, uncivil and impolite, not to mention greed [sic]’. Randolph’s healthy appetite for buttered rolls, chocolate biscuits, and cakes had always infuriated the late dowager, who had called it ‘vulgar and ungentlemanly’. Lord Galloway did not want to see a display of it either.

Three weeks after Randolph’s fourteenth birthday in October 1942, he sat the Common Entrance exam for Harrow. It was a formality since the school would never have turned him down (his results were predictably ‘abysmally low’, even though he was a little old compared to other candidates). Randolph’s inability to please his father was having a profound effect on his social development. ‘My personality was slowly going to pot,’ he wrote, ‘becoming ever entombed in guilt, with the ever encroaching festoons of gloom entwined about complexes and phobias which had me a spectre’s shadow before that term was up. The guilt was deep and intense, becoming ever more so. I gave up laughing, I dared not even smile, thinking both were wrong.’

If Randolph’s propensity for overeating bothered his father, it was about to flip the other way and develop into a much greater problem, one that would threaten Randolph’s physical wellbeing. Randolph’s self-imposed starvation diet – a sign if ever there was one of just how deep-rooted his unhappiness had become – began towards the end of his time at prep school. The masters and subsequently Lady Galloway were once more at a loss as to what to do with him. And yet it was in the midst of the starving and the not smiling or laughing, the growing inferiority complex and the terror of the war, that the plans were finalised for Randolph to begin at Harrow School in the Easter term of 1943.

The memory of the First World War hung over Harrow School like a spectre, but now the school buildings themselves were in danger. That Harrow, merged with Malvern School since the year before, had chosen to stay on the hill placed it at great risk, not of direct attack, but of German pilots losing their way or dropping excess loads after bombing London. Parents, sensing the immediate danger, had begun to withdraw their sons, so that between the summer of 1940 and January 1941 the numbers in the school fell by almost a quarter. During the Blitz in the autumn of 1940, for example, all the boys were transferred to overnight shelters, with separate daytime shelters, and on the night of 2 October, thirty-three school buildings were hit. The first incendiary bomb fell at the feet of the headmaster as he entered the ARP control station in the war memorial.

In his definitive account, A History of Harrow School 1324–1991, Christopher Tyerman writes of how the school had been devastated and consequently shaped by the losses it had sustained during the First World War. Of the 2,917 Harrovians who served, 690 were wounded and 644, including Keith Stewart, were killed. In 1939 at least the school itself had been better prepared. The headmaster, Paul Vellacott DSO, had fought in the First World War and been gassed and taken prisoner. Air-raid precaution planning and classes on air-raid protection had started two years before the Second World War was declared, and detailed plans for dispersing the school during the anticipated aerial bombardment were in place by September 1938 when gas masks were issued.

If Lord and Lady Galloway had any qualms about sending Randolph to a place of such high risk, they did not change course. When Randolph unpacked his bags in the Grove, the same boarding house in which the 10th Earl of Galloway had been placed in April 1848, his parents had effectively placed his safety in the hands of the Senior ARP warden, H. L. Harris. Harris, greatly skilled at his job, would prove deserving of Lord and Lady Galloway’s confidence, but there was no escaping the fact that bombing remained a serious threat to the school until the end of the war.

Randolph’s housemaster was Mr Leonard Henry, a Scot and a first-rate historian who had been at the school for twenty-five years and housemaster of the Grove since 1935. During the First World War he had served in the Inns of Court Officer’s Training Corps, from which he was invalided out. He was a classically educated intellectual of whom a former pupil wrote in the Harrovian, ‘Joined to [his] power of breathing life into the facts of history was a genius for asking questions of them; this impelled one to think.’

Would the spirit of Harrow and the influence of such a man inspire Randolph? Would he learn to think clearly? Discuss and debate ideas? Would he acquire high standards and methods of scholarship? He would not, but Lord Galloway was not prepared to give up hope. Before Randolph left Cumloden for Harrow, John Edgar, Lord Galloway’s head gardener, had taken him for a walk around the grounds and delivered a pep talk about how best to cope with boys tormenting and niggling him. It was a prophetic act of kindness. ‘On account of my phobias and complexes as to what I did or did not do,’ Randolph wrote, ‘I was conspicuous beyond all proportion, and therefore a bit of a drip.’

It defies belief that Lord Galloway could ever have imagined that Harrow in wartime could have done Randolph anything but harm. Beginning life at the school unsettled and disorientated even the healthiest and most stable of boys. One such fellow wrote about it in the Harrovian, under the headline ‘Random Impressions Of A New-Comer’. ‘It was pretty alarming coming here in September, and the latter part of the summer holidays was somewhat clouded by the prospect. My first impression was that all the boys were very big and all the buildings very ugly … I shan’t be sorry when I cease to be a new boy.’

Randolph was assigned a room with another boy, and they had had a view of the school chapel. The following day he joined the newcomers in the fourth form room where Mr Moore, the headmaster who replaced Paul Vellacott, lectured them on the school rules, including the tipping of hats to him or any females connected with the school. There were countless others, which amounted to making Randolph’s first week ‘utterly wretched’. The Harrow in which he found himself was a long way from its halcyon pre-war days. This was not a place of exaggerated happiness and sunshine, where boys lazed about in their boaters at gloriously sunny speech days with strawberries and cream for tea in the house garden, or raucous bathing in ‘Ducker’, buying chocolate on the way. Now the boys – sixth formers and new boys alike – spent much of their time underground in the air raid shelters fashioned out of the school’s cellars, where they would stay until dawn surrounded by a tangle of bedding. The school was blacked out, and its expenditure had been cut so that only essential purchases were made. The cars that had clogged the high street before 1939 were now barely a trickle. Sirens sounded constantly throughout the night and fire bombs scorched the roofs of the school buildings. ‘I seemed to live in a hypnotized world of fright, terror and extreme infidelity,’ Randolph wrote.

War and the threat of death and injury was everywhere. Each new issue of the Harrovian contained the roll of honour – as had been the case throughout the First World War – so the boys could read of the latest dead, the old boys missing, the prisoners of war, and the wounded. Most of the fresh intake of masters under Mr Moore had fought in the First World War, and were governed by the principles of bravery, patriotism, and honour.

The Corps continued with vigour. Randolph began Junior Training Corps two months after he arrived. On Wednesdays and Fridays he and the other younger boys changed out of their grey flannels and ‘bluers’ (the Harrovian word for blazers, which replaced tails for normal dress after the First World War) into a khaki army uniform. The boys marched off, guns on their right shoulders, to the parade ground where they continued marching under the orders of Harrow’s sergeant majors. As an antidote to this compulsory activity Randolph joined the chamber concert club. Those evenings, when he would sit among the audience gathered in the music school listening to Mozart and Beethoven, provided solace, albeit brief. He was much happier there.

In all other ways he was profoundly unhappy. As he wrote himself, he was deeply frightened by his environment, and to exist in a state of such high anxiety was extremely exhausting. He grew even weaker for his determination not to take food: ‘I never touched my share of butter and sugar and utterly disregarded and ignored my sweet coupons.’ Whenever English relatives arrived, bringing with them a lemon Madeira or a canary cake, a small pleasure amid the gloom that surrounded him, Randolph would give it away: ‘I was getting progressively thinner, weaker and paler, so the boys called me a rat and a worm, a drip and a twit, even a weed as my shoulders and cheeks hollowed with my immoderate fasting.’ While the school marched onwards in its own way, clearing unexploded bombs and keeping watch for enemy planes flying over the buildings, Randolph’s weight dropped to five stone. It was hardly the spirit of strength the masters were looking for. On Friday, 5 November 1943, the epitome of that spirit arrived in bodily form.

The Prime Minister, Sir Winston Churchill, one of Harrow’s most famous old boys, descended on the school for what was the fourth of his by then annual visits. Mr and Mrs Moore held a reception for him in the Old Harrovians’ Room, after which he was entertained with a programme of Harrow songs in Speech Room. He then delivered his rousing speech to the school, intended to inspire future generations of soldiers. The path of the war was hard and long, he told them, with no fixed end. ‘However long, however hard, we shall go forward, and no one can tell at what moment the resistance of the enemy may break, but that is not our affair; that is theirs; that is for them.’ He talked of the great responsibility that awaited Britain when the moment of victory came, of the duty and the ‘burden of shaping the future’. Towards the end of his speech, Churchill delivered a message Randolph had heard countless times before, only spoken from different lips:

You young men here, some of you may be in the battlefields or in the high air, others will inherit, will be heirs of the victory which your elders and your parents have gained, and it will be for you to make sure that what has been achieved is not cast away either by the violence of passion or by apathy or by sheer stupidity. But let keen vision, courage, and humanity guide our steps so that it can be said of us that not only did our country do its duty in the war in a way which gained lasting honours, but that afterwards in the years of peace it showed wisdom, a poise and sincerity which contributed in no small degree to binding up the frightful wounds inflicted by the struggle.

In Randolph’s corner the rally cry fell on stony ground. It was not ‘the violence of passion’ or ‘apathy’ or ‘sheer stupidity’ that made him so incapable of stepping into the boots of his predecessors. It was more that the boots did not fit and were becoming more and more uncomfortable. Randolph’s fear of war intensified, with good reason. In the early hours of Ash Wednesday, 22 February 1944, the school suffered a disastrous raid. A bomb hit the Old Harrovians’ Room, where Churchill had been received three months earlier, and there were four fires in the east wing of the Old Schools. The chapel was hit, setting the canopy alight. The science schools, the Butler Museum and the school stores were all ablaze. The wooden ventilator on the roof of Headmaster’s (a boarding house) was set alight, too, and the flames were so strong that only firemen could put them out. The Grove was hit, as was Moreton’s and Malvern School House. While the boys remained below ground in their shelters, parties of masters tried to bring each blaze under control, while others combed the buildings looking for more bombs. A bomb on the chapel stalls burnt itself out and two bombs were found in the gymnasium. Bombs covered the five courts and one had blown a hole near the squash court.

Randolph was in a state of high agitation. The school itself, however, remained strong under threat. Typically, by 9 a.m. the next morning, the holes in the terrace lawn had been neatly turfed over so that there was no sign of the events of the night before. Unexploded bombs were being loaded into wheelbarrows, tarpaulin had been laid over part of the roof of the school stores, and the chancel cleared up. The boys were given an extra hour in bed and then lessons went on as usual.

The following month Lord Galloway arrived at Harrow and took Randolph out to tea. The school stores were not yet restored so they went to the King’s Head instead. Lord Galloway had been told of Randolph’s unpopularity – often at breakfast the boys in the Grove sniggered at him and said, ‘Give the weed some milk and sugar’ – and once again he wanted to try and make his son see sense. He lectured Randolph on the importance of being social and cheerful. ‘Does it matter?’ Randolph responded. ‘Yes, it does matter!’ replied Lord Galloway.

One advantage of Harrow was that after the first year every boy was given a room of his own, with a coal fire and a wooden bed which let down from the wall. The boys were allowed to furnish the rooms as they wished. It was a domestic improvement, but in Randolph there was no improvement at all. Towards the end of June, escorted by the Grove’s matron, Randolph boarded a train to London for a consultation with one of the many psychologists to feature in his life.

Cumloden continued to receive southern relatives. Lady Galloway’s sister arrived (she had been thrown to the ground by the fallout of a doodlebug) as did Mrs Francis Jolliffe Raitt and her sister, Aunt Agatha, an ancient lady who repulsed Randolph and had ‘the silver stubble of a greying beard beneath her ancient mouth’. After the war-torn landscape of suburban London, with its plumes of smoke and buildings with blown-out, charred windows, Cumloden during the holidays was an even greater relief. Randolph loathed the city – this never changed – and being able to walk through the deer park restored his spirits in a way his masters never could. Towards the end of the summer of 1944 Lord Galloway made an announcement. If he saw no improvement in Randolph’s attitude, he would be leaving the school at Christmas. Nothing could have pleased Randolph more. As the new chauffeur drove him out of the gates in the family Rolls, headed for the station, the gamekeeper appeared from the front lodge and cried after him ‘Good luck Lord Garlies!’

‘I was ill at ease, upset and unhappy,’ Randolph wrote of his return. That term he began seeing a psychologist in south Harrow. He was getting used to being asked questions by strange doctors, and he made his way to his first appointment in the slashing rain on his own. He returned dazed (in his memoirs there is no explanation of why this was; perhaps he had been medicated). He then began to wander about in a disorientated fashion, alarming matron. The sirens continued to sound. Randolph sheared off his eyebrows with a pair of scissors, creating for himself a most curious expression: ‘Harrow boys noticed that I had discarded my eyebrows, how silly I looked …’ He also became obsessed with having his hair cut at the local barber’s; he deliberately sat on the lavatory – ‘the throne’ – back to front; and when faced with normal chairs, he perched on their edges with a poker-straight back, a peculiarity that made it into his school report and which Lord Galloway observed ‘must be awfully uncomfortable’. Two days after Randolph’s sixteenth birthday, he went back to the psychologist: ‘I told him exactly how I felt, that I was being spied upon and watched, followed and criticized by members of the school, especially boys.’

One of Harrow’s master’s, Sergeant Major Robert Banks, who clearly had a poor grasp of Randolph’s emotional state, told him that if he wished to join the army, he would have to tighten his shoe straps and behave the way any normal recruit would behave. Then on 1 December, Sir Winston Churchill arrived at the school again to deliver his fifth wartime speech, reminding Randolph once more of all his failings:

Now that we are marching into a period of great stress, of difficulty, now that you will go forward into a world where the problems will be made greater by the victories which have been and will be won, where duty will become more compulsive because of the need to live up to what has happened in the past, now at this time, I say, you give to me, by your voices and by your aspect, that feeling that there will never lack a youth of Britain capable of facing, enduring, conquering everything in the name of freedom and for the sake of their dear, loved native land.

Confirmation that he was leaving Harrow came at the beginning of December in a letter from his father. In the New Year Randolph would go to live at The Rough, the Surrey residence of Lord Galloway’s relative, Shane Randolph Chichester. There, it had been decided, as Randolph recorded later, he would ‘do navvying manual jobs … to overcome this sensation of inferiority complex’. His health had become the concern of the whole family. Even Randolph’s kind Aunt Catherine, who came to visit, gave him a talk about how he should focus on being an asset in life.